The London Peace Society and Absolutist–Reformist Relations within the Peace Movement, 1816–1939

This article revisits the author's pioneering archival work on the world's leading peace association of the nineteenth century, the London Peace Society ( LPS ), to focus on its distinctive strategy for dealing with the fact that from the outset, the peace movement had two distinct wings, absolutist (the small core of pacifists) and reformist (the rather larger penumbra of pacificists ). Unlike other early such associations, which adopted different membership strategies, the LPS catered to both wings but in a two‐tier hierarchy: Its top tier, the national committee that determined its policy, was strictly pacifist and rejected even defensive war, but no such stringency of belief was required of the bottom tier of ordinary members, which therefore contained many pacificists . Top‐tier pacifism served the LPS well for half a century, in particular enabling it to outperform its American counterpart, but for the next half‐century caused it to fall between two stools by disappointing absolutists as well as reformists. It was tacitly abandoned as the LPS plunged into steep decline on passing its centenary and was repudiated on the eve of the Second World War.